Mobile-to-Web adoption in a word: faster

Here's an update to a post earlier this month:

While Morgan Stanley sees mobile devices surpassing desktop PCs within five years as the preferred method to connect to the Internet, Gartner is laying bets on just three years.

The Stamford, Conn.-based information technology research firm released its 2010 IT predictions, including this one: "By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web-access device worldwide."

Gartner crunched the numbers and sees 1.78 billion PCs in use by 2013, vs. 1.82 billion units of smartphones and browser-equipped "enhanced" phones. What's more, the company says, that surpremacy will continue "thereafter."

The predicted adoption rate "does change everything," says Steve Smith, writing in minonline, a media industry watcher. "Mobile users do not click as often on sites from a mobile browser," he says. "Publishers without a credible mobile presence will lose that mobile traffic."

And then there's this Gartner finding cited by Smith: "Web sites not optimized for the smaller-screen formats will become a market barrier for their owners."

But Smith says some early adopters have found a financial benefit to fee-based apps: In the last month, The Guardian, a U.K-based newspaper and website, saw its $3.99 iPhone app downloaded almost 69,000 times. (It gets about 30 percent of the sales revenue, Smith says.)

It's just more evidence that newspapers that haven't gone mobile better hurry up and get with the app.

Time to get (iPhone) mobile

If you're a newspaper publisher and haven't thought yet about a mobile strategy, go sit in the corner.

Mobile is where it's at (or will be soon). Consider this prediction last month from Morgan Stanley in The Mobile Internet Report: "The mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years."

That is, more people will access the Internet through things like smartphones, rather than waiting until they can get their hands on a computer keyboard.

So what does that mean for newspapers? The possibility of more eyeballs on their Web sites, which then could possibly be sold to advertisers to bolster a revenue stream that hasn't yet come close to matching the sales seen from traditional ads on newsprint.

Morgan Stanley credits the convergence of five factors for the "dramatic growth" it foresees in mobile Internet usage: 3G adoption, social networking (aided by Facebook), video (YouTube had 466 million global users in October, up 35 percent from the same month in 2008), VoIP and "impressive mobile devices."

Of the latter, the report says, "Apple’s iPhone, iTouch and App Store launches over (the) past 2.5 years created the spark for mobile Internet liftoff, as Microsoft’s launch of Windows 3.0 did for the PC in 1990 and the Netscape browser (and its IPO) did for the desktop Internet in 1995." (Report's pdf here.)

To be sure, news organizations like the New York Times and Reuters are actively pushing their product to mobile devices, and others are hiring to follow suit. But far more operations haven't taken the plunge, leading one newspaperman-turned-deep-thinker to plead for a mobile-first strategy.

He's worried, though, the response will be reminiscent of the "Web-first" rally cry that caused so much indigestion in newsrooms, where the concern was that pushing stories to the website as they were filed would scoop the print product. Yet one comment included in his mobile-first manifesto (Scribd here) offers some hope: "The only way you can do this wrong is to not do anything at all. Let's try SOMETHING other than talk about it."

To which those of us who want to make a living in newspapers say "Amen!"